‘It sounds vile.’
‘It was.’
Aoife stops at the cottage gate. ‘So you got married dressed as Little Bo Peep?’
Monica laughs. She wants to say to Aoife: that’s it, I’m not going back to him, it’s over. She knows Aoife will understand, won’t ask too much. But there will be time for that later. ‘I did.’
‘Without me.’
‘Without you.’
‘Ah well,’ Aoife shrugs, ‘we all make mistakes.’
Monica sighs. She puts a hand out and touches Aoife’s arm and Aoife doesn’t pull away. ‘We do,’ she says. ‘We do. And speaking of which . . .’
‘What?’
Monica bites her lip. ‘Well, Mammy says she thinks . . .’
Aoife pulls away now, doing the old classic flounce. ‘I know what she thinks.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘It it true? Are you . . .’ Monica finds she is having trouble with the word ‘pregnant’. The air around them is stirring in a most distracting way, rippling its fingers through the leaves, and she knows that they are both thinking the same thing, that their minds are picturing the same image of a hospital bed, of two people bent together in a cubicle.
‘I am,’ Aoife says, not meeting her eye.
‘Oh, Aoife.’
‘What does “Oh, Aoife” mean?’
‘I don’t know. Just that . . . well . . .’ Her voice is high and strained. She pulls her sister to her, surprised as always by how slight Aoife feels, how small her skeleton is, still, even though she’s an adult, how it would be so easy for someone to hurt her. ‘. . . I . . . just that . . .’
‘Just that what?’
Monica throws her hands up in the air. She is annoyed by the stinging of her eyes, by the compressed sensation in her throat. ‘There’ll be another baby!’ she exclaims.
Aoife nods. She opens the gate and heads up the path.
‘What about the father?’ Monica is asking, as she follows her up the path. ‘He’s . . . involved, I take it? He’s a lawyer, isn’t he? Well, that’s something. A steady job, a good income. But I think you should come back to London. You can’t have it in New York, away from all of us. You could live at Gillerton Road for a while, have the baby there, and then—’
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Aoife hisses, as she opens the front door. ‘I would die. I would literally expire.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I’d rather have it in a ditch.’
Monica giggles as they jostle about in the hall, removing wellingtons and cardigans. ‘Aoife—’
‘I would. I’d rather have it in a chicken coop, a cat box, anywhere.’
Monica heaves at her left, recalcitrant wellington, always her larger foot. ‘I can’t get this one off,’ she whispers.
‘A railway carriage,’ Aoife is muttering, ‘a tool shed, a coal scuttle. Give it to me.’ She tugs at the wellington. ‘Come on, you fecker.’ She gives a great heave and the wellington flies off with a sucking noise, sending Aoife reeling backwards, her head crashing into a lantern on a hook. ‘Bollocks,’ she says, rubbing her head.
Their mother’s voice booms out of the darkness: ‘Will you two keep it down? Some of us are trying to sleep.’
Monica and Aoife make their way along the passage and into the room they are sharing. Aoife collapses on to her side of the bed.
‘Do you think it’s possible to die from tiredness?’ she says, her eyes already closed.
‘I don’t know,’ Monica says, and climbs between the sheets, ‘but I’m sure you must have given it a try.’
In the morning, Gretta and Monica make bread. They eat it in the front garden, spread with butter they bought yesterday from the place where they’d stopped to get petrol. They bring the kitchen chairs out into the sun and Claire spreads a blanket on the grass for the children. But they don’t sit on it. Hughie balances himself like a bird on the wall and Vita rolls herself up in the blanket like, Gretta thinks, that kitten in the storybook.
‘Are you not terribly hot in there?’ Gretta asks her, from her perch on the chair.
Vita squints up at her, cheeks flushed pink. ‘Nope,’ she says.
Gretta shrugs and sips her second cup of tea of the day. She likes it scalding hot, properly steeped, black, without the slightest hint of milk. Always has.
The sun beats down on them all. When will this weather break? It can’t last much longer.
Michael Francis and Claire sit together on the grass, his arm around her shoulders. Hughie, looking out towards the mainland, asks, where are all the people, why is Ireland so empty? And Michael Francis starts to tell him about the famine, about blighted potatoes, about the thousands and thousands of people who left, got on boats and sailed away and never came back. Hughie listens, a slice of bread in each hand. Vita chants the word ‘diaspora’ to herself, over and over, as she rolls about in her blanket.
At about ten o’clock, Aoife staggers out of the front door and collapses on to the step. She groans, jams on a pair of sunglasses and sticks a cigarette into her mouth.
‘What time is it?’ she rasps, searching her pockets for a lighter.
In a flash, Monica is out of her seat and snatching the cigarette from her mouth. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she says.
Aoife regards her, her face screwed up. Monica bends down and takes the packet away from her, and the lighter. Aoife groans again, buries her face in her arms.
‘What’s up with her?’ Gretta hears Michael Francis ask.
Claire shushes him, says, ‘Never mind.’
‘Do you want a slice of bread?’ Gretta asks her youngest daughter.
‘No.’ Aoife raises her head and seems to rethink this reply. ‘Actually, yes.’
‘Good girl.’ Gretta gets up, pleased to have a task. She doesn’t like sitting about, no matter what is wrong in life. It does you good to have something ahead of you, regardless how small.
She is in the kitchen, shaving curls off the top of the butter, when she hears Hughie burst out, ‘Look!’
Gretta lets the knife slide from her hand.
‘What?’ Michael Francis says.
‘Look who’s coming!’
Gretta is out of the door, into the sunlight and down the path. At the gate, she stops. She shades her eyes with her hands. A person is coming off the causeway, just setting foot on the sloping track of the island. A stooped walk, head bent. As they watch, one hand rises in greeting.
‘Is it him?’ Monica, who’s always been short-sighted but would never admit it, says.
Gretta swings open the gate, stepping out of the garden. She raises her own hand to wave back.
‘It is,’ she says.
Maggie O'Farrell, Instructions for a Heatwave
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